Zuckmayer and Company

...Writers & Writing ZUCKMAYER AND COMPANY BY PEARL K. BELL OCCASIONALLY IN the course of reading an autobiography I have felt the writer walk magically out of the flat black-and-white pages of print and assume a presence so alive, so tangible and commanding, that I could scarcely believe I had known the person only in a book This extraordinary embodiment first occurred when I read Isak Dmesen's Out of Africa, it has now happened with a very different kind of autobiography, Carl Zuckmayer's A Part of Myself (Harcourt Brace Jovano'vich, 413 pp, $7 95) The subtitle in the German original, Hours of Friendship, is as precise an evocation of its spirit as the American subtitle, Po>-trait of an Epoch, is pretentiously inflated For the words friend and friendship seem to recur in A Part of Myself almost as regularly as punctuation marks, yet they never sound hollow or redundant Even more to the point, though the range of Zuckmayer's friendships throughout his extraordinarily full 74 years has embraced some of the most eminent figures of his time, particularly intellectuals and artists--Bertolt Brecht and Max Reinhardt, Thomas Mann and Marlene Dietrich, Pare Lorentz, Dorothy Thompson, Emil Jannings, Count Helmuth von Moltke, and hundreds more of that and lesser orders--what emerges so concretely and poignantly from these pages is the realization that all of them were indeed his friends, not names to be dropped in the self-serving memoirs of old age Clearly, whatever his permanent importance as a playwright eventually proves to be, Zuckmayer's greatest gift is his lifelong talent for friendship When the Anschluss brought Austria under Hitler's gun and Zuckmayer was forced to flee, he did not mind the loss of house and possessions nearly as much as the abandonment of friends Describing the tortuous tram ride in 1939 that was carrying him away from the Nazi noose--his plays had been banned because one pair of his grandparents was Jewish and most of his political convictions were outspokenly Socialist--Zuckmayer reflects on the sinister poisons that can accumulate in the blocd of exiles "The only remedy for those deep-seated feelings of insecurity, for that sense of homelessness, is the existence of friendship Through the darkness of the ages the saga of friendship is scattered like the strings of lights of peopled towns and streets over a nocturnal landscape It is a voice that goes to the heart more purely than the sweet accents of courtship, the mellifluous lines of the minnesong, for it is without lust The feelings of friendship are more intense than those of sensual passion Its goal is not possession or fulfilment, but constancy, the continual act of fidelity And the crudest failure in human relations is when the fidelity of friendship breaks down--not in the struggle between the sexes" If this sounds a trifle sentimental, only the lack of context enforced by quotation makes it so Rather, Zuckmayer's seemingly extravagant claims for the values of friendship are old-fashioned, and all the more touching in a writer whose antennae were keenly attuned to the new, the dissident, the esthetically and politically radical currents of Weimar Germany, though he early learned that his own playwriting talents could flourish only in more traditional forms His first play, Ciossioads, produced in 1920, was slavishly Expressionist in style and mood, but he soon cast off those stale and mannered devices While Zuckmayer responded with terrific excitement to the rude blast of fresh air his friend Brecht blew into the theater of Weimar Berlin, and recognized the stance of genius immediately, ho characteristically took stock of his own limitations honestly and accurately "I had neither the gift nor the wish to inaugurate a new epoch in literature, a new theatrical style But I knew that a new vitality in effects and in values could be achieved by certain artistic means that were essentially timeless, by a kind of humane art that can never be outmoded as long as human beings think of themselves as what they are " Carl Zuckmayer grew up in the Rhmeland city of Mainz, in a prosperous middle-class home remarkable only for the close, loving warmth of its happy family life He might have moved through the predictable paces--Gymnasium, university, business career--had he not enlisted m the Army at 18 with the outbreak of World War I, his head inflamed by the virus of German nationalism But the senseless butchery of battle turned the young man into a pacifist and Socialist, and in time he discovered that the theater, not his father's cork factory, was his vocation After some false starts and crushing flops, he had an enormous success in postwar Berlin with the earthy rustic comedy The Merry Vineyard and the antimilitary farce Kope-nick In these years, too, he wrote the screenplay for that quintessential product of the Weimar Republic, The Blue Angel Success brought in its wake a comfortable old house in the enchanting countryside of Western Austria near Salzburg, apartments in Berlin and Vienna, a happy marriage, an exuberantly sybaritic swell of great food and wine, and the most stimulating friends m the world With nostalgia and grace Zuckmayer recalls the high-living elite of Salzburg, gathered in Reinhardt's elegant 18th-century castle during those last years before the Anschluss He also provides meticulous, affectionate accounts of the simple, ordinary rituals of Austrian village life When Hitler swallowed Austria, the Zuckmayers fled first to Switzerland, then to France and England, and in 1939 (the wheels of immigration turned by his redoubtable friend Dorothy Thompson) they arrived in America In New York they came so close to destitution that Zuckmayer reluctantly followed such fellow refugees as Reinhardt, Fritz Lang and Ernst Lubitsch out "to that anteroom of Hell called Hollywood " But the enormous salary of a movie writer failed to persuade him that he could ever be happy in that bizarre Western desert teetering on the brink of "a dreary, murderous wasteland the city of Los Angeles " Thus at the age of 48, with no experience of the land, Zuckmayer decided that to survive m America he must become a farmer With the fortitude that is summonable only in exile, this cosmopolitan European put his shoulder, and much more to the grinding necessities of goat farming in Vermont "During the first two years after we moved there I did not leave the farm for a single day I learned every imaginable farm, woods, and household task " Though he never puts it so self-indulgently, clearly it took the staggering physical labor of his new life to allay the guilt and anxiety he suffered about his parents and friends caught m wartime Europe while he breathed safe and free in America The Zuckmayers became American citizens during their years in New England, but once the War was over they were inexorably drawn back home Now living in German-speaking Switzerland, he is unafraid to admit to his "obstinate faith in a different Germany, in a true German spirit which must not be equated with the German filth " One may balk at Zuckmayer's embracing charity, but it is impossible not to be moved by the nobility and kindness that radiate through the account of his homecoming Zuckmayer cannot be faulted for this shamefully sloppy British edition of his work, picked up whole by the American publisher The typographical errors and solecisms, the thoughtless cutting of some hundred pages from the German text, are left unremedied, unconsidered, unexcused The opening sentences are defaced by a glaring failure of idiom "Where is our home9 Where we are born, or where do we wish to die9" Where were the editors when that do slipped through9 And more than once people "crave for' things instead of craving Martin Esshn, the German-born British authority on Brecht and Pinter, recently leveled some other criminal charges against this botched edition in the New Statesman "Again and again, on referring back to my copy of the original book to find out the real meaning of one or the other sentence, I discovered the most puzzling cuts Often it strikes me these were made because the translators seemed to assume that the people referred to were without interest, or perhaps unknown to English-speaking readers If it is assumed that German cultural figures of this magnitude [Stefan George, Max Weber, Ernst Bloch] are of no interest to readers in this country or America, why bother to translate the book in the first place9" Carl Zuckmayer deserves greater respect from his translators, but it is better to have this amputated version of A Piece of Myself than none at all Though he sets down his reminiscences and reflections with deceptive artlessness, there is a continuity of honor, wit and life-celebrating dedication in this book that no amount of war, exile, poverty, and disappointment has ever seriously diminished This is a marvelous revelation of a truly marvelous and beautiful man...